At least the Legislature had about 3 good days

Exhale, Arizona. After 171 appalling days, the Legislature has left town. OK, that may not be entirely fair. It was a great year if you own a sports franchise or enjoy a six-figure income. It was a pretty good year if you own a private school, are a female prison inmate or likely to find yourself out of a job in the future.

For the rest of us, it was, well ... the good news is, the Legislature has left town. Let’s call it 168 appalling days and maybe three good ones.

I’ll start with the good:

Community colleges can now offer four-year degrees.

Gov. Doug Ducey and the Legislature passed a bill that will allow community colleges to offer a limited number of baccalaureate degrees. It’s about time, given the state’s crying need for more teachers, more nurses and a more educated workforce.

The Arizona Board of Regents for years has blocked this incursion onto their turf, but this year, Republicans and Democrats briefly set aside their brass knuckles and passed a bipartisan bill to greatly expand the state’s higher education options.

Good for them for understanding that not every course of study needs to come from a pricey research university and not every student wants to be saddled with thousands of dollars of debt.

Unemployed workers will get a little extra help.

If there is any silver lining to the pandemic, it’s that Republicans finally realized this state’s safety net for laidoff workers is a joke.

Since 2004, the state’s unemployment insurance program has offered a maximum of $240 a week. No state, other than Mississippi, offers less.

Ducey and the Legislature this year boosted unemployment pay to $320 a week and raised the amount you can make on the side to $160, up from the current $30. That’s still just $8 an hour, and the amount of time you can collect it is reduced when unemployment is low.

Still, it’s progress in a state that hasn’t raised unemployment pay since 2004.

Female prison inmates will get tampons.

Thanks to the “Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act,” women in prison now will be guaranteed a decent supply of feminine hygiene products.

The new law also bans the shackling of pregnant women and allows new mothers to be with their newborns for 72 hours after giving birth.

Sports betting is coming to Arizona.

Just in time for football season, you’ll be able to place bets on sports and fantasy sports games. Ducey was hot to expand on- and off-reservation gambling in a big way and the skids were greased from the git-go to get this

bill to his desk. Not even the Center for Arizona Policy’s Cathi Herrod, who always opposes gambling bills on moral grounds, raised a peep.

Here’s a sure bet. The people who will make out like bandits are the owners of the Arizona Cardinals, the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Phoenix Suns and the state’s other professional sports franchises. They’ve been given exclusive rights to set up bookie operations.

It’s never been explained why team owners — many of whom also are, just coincidentally, campaign contributors — should get to corner the market on what is sure to be a multimillion-dollar profit center.

I guess all those campaign contributions paid off.

Now, for the bad:

The Senate’s audit has been coast-to-coast embarrassment.

Senate Republicans threatened to arrest the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in their quest to get their hands on the county’s 2.1 million ballots, tabulation machinery and information on every voter. Only Sen. Paul Boyer, the 16th and final vote needed to hold them in contempt, stood between the supervisors and handcuffs.

It just went downhill from there to ninjas, spinning tables, the hunt for

abamboo and a mysterious road trip to a Montana log cabin, where copies of the county’s election data — perhaps even your personal data — now reside.

The only thing missing as Senate President Karen Fann initiated this circus?

Any actual evidence that the election was stolen.

Voters took a sharp slap across the face.

Horrified that voters slapped a 3.5% surcharge on individual incomes above $250,000 to boost funding for schools, Ducey and the Legislature swung into action to protect their pals.

They couldn’t change what the voters did. So instead they cut the general tax rate for the state’s wealthiest residents to just 1%, while the rest of us will pay two and a half times that.

Republicans insist that everybody wins, the economy will boom and state coffers will overflow as word gets out that rich people will pay less, percentage wise, than the rest of us in general state taxes.

No word on what happens when the next recession hits and we can’t fund government because our leaders enacted yet another tax cut — this one a $1.8 billion whopper billed as the largest in state history.

Oh, we get a tax cut, too. If your tax bracket is $30,000 to $40,000, you’ll score an average windfall of $8, according to legislative budget analysts.

If you make $75,000 to $100,000, you’re looking at $115.

Meanwhile, if you bring in $500,000 to $1 million a year, you’ll enjoy a tax cut averaging $12,133.

Stings, doesn’t it?

Here comes voucher expansion

(again).

The Senate tried mightily to push through a massive expansion of the state’s school voucher program, finally sliding it into the budget in the dead of night and hoping it would fly. But it was no joy for them as several House Republicans balked.

As they should given that voters, in overwhelming numbers, just vetoed a massive expansion of vouchers in 2018.

Still, Republican legislators just cannot let it go and in the Legislature’s final hours shoved through a mini-expansion of vouchers, one that’ll make it easier and quicker for qualified kids to score an Empowerment Scholarship Account. Gone, for example, is the requirement that certain kids must actually attend a public school before declaring that they need public funds to escape public schools.

Should be a great marketing tool for the owners of private schools.

And here comes payback for year’s election.

After Democrats turned out in record numbers to cast early ballots — and Joe Biden and Mark Kelly won the state — Republicans lost their minds.

Some wanted to put an end to early voting or to bar county elections officials

last from going out into the community to register people to vote. Others simply wanted to declare that our votes don’t count when it comes to selecting a presidential candidate.

No, really.

I guess it’s to their credit that most of their desperate ideas went nowhere. But Republicans did manage to order up a purge of the state’s early voter list of an estimated 125,000 people so that occasional voters (read: the ones who don’t tend to vote for them) don’t automatically receive an early ballot in the mail.

They also threw in a requirement that county elections officials report to the state auditor any time they go out into the community to register people to vote. This, due to a suspicion that a certain unnamed county more often goes out into communities where fewer people are registered to vote.

They also directed the state Game and Fish Department to provide a voter registration form to anyone who applies for a hunting, fishing or trapping license.

All this, they passed on bare minimum party-line votes. All this, in a desperate attempt to cling to control of the state.

Me? I’m wondering, wouldn’t it be easier to just do stuff that appeals to more people?